the quiet things that no one ever knows
by LadyMoriel
Summary: Loki has never understood death. That doesn't stop it from following wherever he goes, even as a child. (Warnings for animal death and canonical character death.)
1. Chapter 1

_Warnings for this fic: it's basically all about death in general, and the first chapter specifically is about animal death. The shorter second chapter is still about death, but that's mostly about Frigga, so it's a little different, and you can skip right to that if you don't want to read a scene of animal death. On the plus side, this isn't a very happy fic, but it was going to be even sadder.  
_

 _Title is from an otherwise unrelated song by Brand New._

* * *

The first time Loki encounters death, he is a child, and he does not understand.

He and Thor are exploring the city streets alone. Technically they are not supposed to do this, but no harm has come of it so far, and anyway it's a beautiful day, exactly the kind no one can stand to spend indoors. Summer's heat is finally starting to fade, the air sharper and crisper without actually becoming cold yet. The marketplace is a fascinating hive of activity, and the residential streets nearby are as peaceful as the market is busy, all sun-warmed stone and wood and arching trees.

Loki doesn't see it happen, only the immediate aftermath: the carriage driver cursing and jerking his horse back toward the center of the road, and the small body of a brown and white cat lying limp on the paving stones. For a moment they both stare, and then Thor takes off running after the carriage, shouting his outrage. Loki is frozen, everything feeling curiously unreal except the cat's still little body and the panicky conviction that he has to _do something_.

The cat's leg jerks as it struggles to get up, and the shock of realizing it's still alive jolts Loki into action. Maybe he can help it, he has to _try_ , and he can't just leave it lying in the road to get run over again—

He darts out into the street, heart thumping, and picks the cat up as carefully as he can. He tries to support its spine with his arms without getting blood on his clothes, but its head flops over his wrist, and he hurries to lay it down again at the side of the road. Its tail lies in a limp curve on the paving stones and somehow that is the worst part, the most _wrong_. Cats keep their tails in motion, lashing the full length back and forth or twitching the tip, or sitting with it curled close and neat around their paws. Not…this.

"It's all right," Loki says. His voice sounds small and shaky. "You're going to be all right. I'm…I'm right here, sweetheart," he adds, haltingly, because it's what his mother always says when he's sick or hurt, but he doesn't know how to make it comforting like she does.

The cat's wearing a narrow red collar, he realizes with an awful lurch in his stomach: it's a housecat, not just an unlucky stray, and that makes it even worse. He fumbles with the buckle for a moment that feels agonizingly long and finally pulls it free, but there's only a little bell on the collar, nothing to indicate where the cat belongs or who might want to know their pet is hurt.

Loki rests one hand on the cat's side and feels the tiny motion of its breathing. There has to be something he can do, he thinks helplessly, but he doesn't know any healing spells and can't think of anyone nearby who does. And he can't go for help anyway, because that means leaving the cat to suffer alone, and—he can't. So instead he kneels there for what feels like a very long time, stroking the cat's slightly sticky fur as blood pools beneath its ear and open mouth.

Thor comes back eventually, a ferocious scowl on his face that softens when he sees Loki. "I couldn't catch him," he explains, and crouches at the cat's other side. "Is it…?"

"It was still alive," Loki says. "I thought…I…I don't know." He doesn't _know_ , and that's still worse, that he knows he felt it breathing but its mouth and eyes are fixed open, every part of its body limp, and its whiskers don't twitch when he touches one.

Thor puts his hand in front of the cat's mouth, and Loki finds himself holding his own breath (as if that will make a difference). After a moment Thor draws back with a grimace.

Loki's hand falters in its stroking. "I don't know when it happened," he says, and his voice sounds as small and lost as he suddenly feels. "He _was_ alive. It was. I don't…" _I don't understand_ , he wants to say, and swallows it because what would be the point?

Thor puts a hand on his shoulder. "Come on, brother. Let's find somewhere to get you washed up and then we can go home."

 _I can't just leave him_ , Loki wants to say, but he swallows that too, his throat feeling tight. There's nothing he can do, after all; the cat is dead and past helping. It seems so _wrong_ , lying there limp and bloody, eyes staring at nothing. He should close its eyes, Loki thinks, that's what you do with a body and it's one last thing he can do for this poor little animal, but when he tries he can't make the eyelids move.

"Come on," Thor repeats, his voice gentler than usual, and he helps Loki to his feet. His knees are dirty and aching, Loki realizes abruptly, and there's drying blood all over his hands and up both arms, another bright red spot of it on his shoe. He doesn't know when that happened either.

"He was wearing a collar," Loki says numbly. "Somebody's going to look for him. We can't just…"

"I'll tell someone," Thor promises. "But there's nothing else we can do except get in trouble for sneaking out."

It's never really mattered before, but Loki imagines being scolded now and cringes at the idea. Trying to use the cat as an excuse feels wrong in a way he doesn't think he can explain, but trying to concentrate on anything else and act contrite for something that's only a problem when they get caught—that's awful too and he doesn't want to deal with any of it. So he gives up and nods, and Thor finds a waterspout where he can wash off the blood (red and sticky, with so much more left behind on the street, and he scrubs until his skin is pink and stinging). The blood on his shoe rinses off too, leaving him clean like nothing ever happened, and then they sneak back into the palace the way they snuck out.

Loki's chambers are down the hall from Thor's, and indecision chews at him as they approach Thor's door. He needs to be alone, needs to be with _someone_ , doesn't know how to ask for either, and so he says nothing. They both hesitate before Thor gives him an awkward smile and a pat on the shoulder, and then Thor disappears into his room and Loki shuts himself in his own.

He tries to read, for a while. He finds himself staring into space instead with no idea of what he's been reading for the past few minutes, and when he pages back to find the place he stopped paying attention, nothing looks familiar and none of the words quite make sense together. Finally he gives it up as pointless and goes to bed early, curled away from the window because it's still not dark yet and some light gets in even through the thick curtains.

Every time he closes his eyes, he sees the cat again and that horrible stillness; imagines another child somewhere in the city, distraught over the loss of a beloved pet. Staring into the dimness of his empty room isn't much better. He wants, rather badly, to get out of bed and run to Thor's room, crawl under the covers, and stay where he knows someone is alive and breathing, wants to get away from the silence battering at his skull, but—

He's gone to Thor's room before, sometimes, when he's had a particularly bad nightmare (and after some of his worst nightmares, when he's curled shivering beneath his blankets, heart pounding and body frozen, sometimes Thor seems to know instinctively, and then he comes to Loki's room instead—although now that Loki thinks about it, he realizes that hasn't happened for some time). Thor's never turned him away, even if during the day he sometimes likes his friends' company more than Loki's. But this is—Thor will know why Loki is upset, because they both saw it, and for the first time he isn't sure his brother will understand _why_. He would listen if Loki tried to explain, probably, but the idea of speaking it aloud is bad enough, when he isn't even sure he can. The thought of struggling for words, trying to give voice to that awful _wrongness_ that is a cat who was alive and isn't anymore, a life cut short when Loki was _right there_ , touching it, and he still doesn't know when it happened—trying to make Thor understand why it was so wrong and jarring when he can't find the words to understand it for himself—

He imagines trying, and being met with incomprehension. Imagines—worse—empty reassurances from Mother, who would comfort him because he is upset but might not understand either, and the idea is unbearable.

He sleeps, eventually. But for days after, he thinks of it again at the most random moments, the cat and how still it was and how death doesn't make _sense_ , and all he can do is miserably hope the little animal knew it wasn't alone when it died.


	2. Chapter 2

Death is a part of life, he is told later, even in the Realm Eternal. No one explains _why_ , and he still doesn't know how to ask. Eventually he accepts it, because death is in fact an inescapable part of life, especially for a culture of warriors, but accepting reality does not mean he truly understands. It only means he stops trying to understand.

* * *

Lifetimes away from that child exploring the city streets, he hangs from the wreck of the shattered Bifrost, unable to think of a single reason for holding on, and so he opens his hand, and falls, and expects to die.

He doesn't.

* * *

Thanos and his lackeys teach him what it means to long for death, but that is not understanding either, only pain and despair.

* * *

Frigga is not dead. She cannot be dead because there is no body (he has seen no body) and no funeral (he is not allowed to attend her funeral and no one will tell him any details until long after, when he is wearing another face). She is not dead because she cannot, _cannot_ be dead—

* * *

He wakes cold and alone on Svartalfheim. Thor's cry of grief still rings in his ears, but Thor himself is nowhere to be found. He had to do something about Malekith and the Convergence, of course, could not be _Thor_ and simply stand by to grieve over his brother's empty corpse, but for a moment Loki wishes, foolishly—

Well, it has never mattered what Loki wishes, has it?

For the first time in a very long time—certainly decades, probably centuries—he thinks of the cat again, how limp it was on the stone pavement, how utterly, unnaturally still. How Thor was so certain it was dead, and he wonders now if Thor was wrong about that too, if they left it behind to die alone.

* * *

He never does see Frigga's body, even later, because she was given to the stars while he stayed buried and suffocating underground. There is a memorial, and he orders another one, but it all seems hollow and unreal. Instead there is only a great absence, and no statue or painting, no matter how beautiful or lifelike, can fill it or change it.

She deserves a better memorial than lifeless stone, he thinks eventually. There is a species of tree, native to Vanaheim but extinct there for millennia; it is tall and graceful, at least in pictures, with silver bark and golden leaves, and he fixates on it, knowing it won't bring her back but unable to shake the idea that it might _mean_ something. Other things demand his attention, more important things, and for weeks at a time he ignores them entirely, first searching the Realms for a seed and then, when at last he finds one (desiccated but perfectly preserved in a long-forgotten Jotun tomb, of all places, and the irony is not lost on him, even as he takes care to disturb nothing else), coaxing it into life.

The day the seed finally sprouts, he is sitting in the rooms that used to be Frigga's, wearing his own face because the doors are warded and it is exhausting always existing within the guise of someone else. There is still so much he needs to do, the mundane duties of rule and the looming specter of the Titan, but he is tired and entirely alone and it is so hard, sometimes, to remember that there is a point to any of this. Gradually he realizes that he is thinking, rather absurdly, of the cat again, as he watches dust motes drift through a shaft of sunlight—the cat and how it was alive and then it wasn't, and how death has never quite lost that sense of _wrongness_ , no matter how many times he has experienced it since. More than anything else, it is a fundamental wrongness in the universe, that he is still here and Frigga is not.

A flash of color in the pot catches his eye. He stands—slowly, stiffly, as if he's as old in truth as his now-customary glamor makes him look—and crosses the room to the window, where he placed the pot to catch enough sunlight. A tiny, pale curl of green is sticking up out of the soil. It looks almost impossibly fragile, and easy to crush, but it is already reaching toward the light.

Loki stands there for long time, just looking at the seedling and feeling the sunlight on his hands. He has the brief, absurd thought that perhaps Frigga and that long-dead nameless cat will find each other in Valhalla. It's a fanciful notion, a child's thought, but the aching child inside him takes a little comfort from it, if only for a moment.

* * *

 _Additional notes:_

This odd, sad little fic exists purely because of the original scene with the cat. That part happened to me, more or less, and I didn't really know how to process it, so the obvious thing was to put Loki in the same situation so he could...also not deal with it. It wasn't quite the same for me, of course: this happened recently, so I was 30, not a kid, and of course it was a car, not anything involving a horse. I responded better than Loki does here, too. (I don't know exactly why I want to tell this story after having just retold it through fic, but I do, so: I was on vacation in Dublin and walking to a bus stop in a residential area with my friend, and we saw that traffic had stopped and then saw the cat; I froze at first too, like the other shocked people standing around who'd come out of their houses. Then I heard the asshole driver saying the best thing would probably be to run it over again to put it out of its misery, and that got me moving; I carried it out of the road to the sidewalk-asshole driver immediately left, having never even gotten out of his car-and took off its collar looking for ID. A woman who lived nearby stayed but didn't know what to do, so I took charge a little bit, seeing she had a smartphone and telling her I didn't have data outside the US so she needed to Google an emergency vet and call them so they could help. Another woman let me into her house to wash off the blood. And then my friend and I left to catch our bus, because at that point there wasn't anything else we could do. I should also note that everything with Thor is fabricated purely for this story and has nothing to do with my friend, who was also upset.) But the rest is...more or less exactly what happened, at least the incident itself, the details about the cat, and how it all felt, and it stuck with me, the way it sticks with Loki here.

I don't understand death either, is the thing. I've never lost a close friend or relative (although I realize it's just a matter of time), so I've never really been forced to deal with it. At most it's been something peripheral to me, close enough to feel wrong and surreal but not close enough to be awful and personal. My own cat had to be put down, several years ago, and that was surreal in a bad way too, but I still had my dog, and a new cat came into our lives shortly after, so it was...different. A few days after the Las Vegas shooting, I learned that one of the victims was a good friend of my sister and brother-in-law; I never met him so it's still not personal for me, but even for me it feels _wrong_ to suddenly have this violence come closer to home and even closer to my sister (who's gone out of state for country concerts before and could easily have been at this one, if she didn't have a baby to take care of). Even at a remove from me, or when it's something like that cat in Dublin where it's physically close but not anyone I know, I just sort of...can't make sense of it, that a living being was alive and part of others' lives and just isn't anymore. None of that's unique to me, I know, and I doubt this fic has done anything to make it make any more sense to me or anyone else, but...I guess I wanted to write and share it anyway.

Oh, and in case anyone's curious: when I said that this was originally going to be sadder, I meant that it wasn't going to have the whole final bit about the seed (in other words, it would have ended with the previous section about Svartalfheim), because I didn't think of that until later. But then I did think of it and basically went "oh thank God, I can end it on a note that isn't completely crushing."


End file.
